This article tells the story of how the Ball-Stick-Bird reading system, intended for superior dyslexic students, was applied to the teaching of reading to individuals with severe to moderate mental retardation. The system incorporates developmental linguistics to make story reading easier for the beginning student. The first books of the series are composed primarily of nouns and their action verbs, and gradually adjectives and adverbs are added. In some individuals, an intellectual explosion is triggered, as the teaching system taps a fundamental building block of human cognitive organization, namely, a miniature story built with nouns at first and progressing to nouns and verbs, constituting a fundamental unit of cognitive organization which has been termed the "story engram." Every human culture talks with the engram, thinks with it, and uses it as a building block to produce bigger and bigger stories. It is the universal trademark of the human brain that it spends much of its waking life listening to, telling, and thinking up stories. Two mentally retarded individuals who experienced dramatic personality changes along with the growth in cognition through the use of this approach are profiled. (JDD)